We Don’t Live Here Anymore – Volume 1

Collected Short Stories & Novellas, Volume 1

In the early 1970s, literary journals that contained Andre Dubus short stories were passed around amongst admiring readers. When his debut collection Separate Flights arrived in 1975, it was immediately celebrated and the collection won the Boston Globe‘s Laurence L. & Thomas Winship/PEN New England Award. Separate Flights included the novella “We Don’t Live Here Anymore,” which served as the basis for the 2004 film of the same title (nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival); the novella also introduces Dubus’s writer-protagonist Hank Allison, a character who continues to appear throughout his work.

Two years later, the title story of Dubus’s sophomore collection Adultery & Other Choices continued the exploits of Hank Allison. “The title story alone will make it worth your while to go out and get the book,” wrote the New York Times Book Review.

While the collection’s opening stories focus on the fragile nature of youth, later stories shift to darker struggles of adulthood, such as in “Andromache”—Dubus’s first story to appear in The New Yorker (1968)—which traces the aftermath of a tragic death during wartime.

Praise for We Don’t Live Here Anymore:

“Dubus is a patient, resourceful and profound writer who never gives in to convention—although his situations are our situations, and imminently recognizable. The great, addictive pleasure of reading him arises from our anticipation that he is always going to say something interesting.”

— Richard Ford

“Andre Dubus’s brilliant stories are so full of compassion and humor, heartache and desire, violence and tenderness, that, reading them, it’s impossible not to see the most secret and shameful parts of our own lives reflected back at us. I can think of few writers whose stories are so profoundly moving that I find myself responding to them both viscerally and intellectually—sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page. These beautiful new editions triumphantly showcase stories by one of the greatest writers America has ever produced.”